The VP’s team has been accused of lifting text wholesale from the US president’s aborted election effort
US Vice President Kamala Harris has finally revealed her policy proposals, only for eagle-eyed viewers to discover that her website’s ‘issues’ section appears to have been lifted wholesale from President Joe Biden’s site.
Harris announced her candidacy in July, after Biden – who appeared visibly weakened and unsurer during a debate with Donald Trump the previous month – suspended his campaign. While Harris’ entry to the presidential race was met with enthusiasm from Democrats, the vice president has come under increasing pressure for refusing to sit for unscripted interviews and declining to publish any policy proposals on her campaign website.
The Harris campaign appeared to rectify the latter concern on Sunday, adding an ‘issues’ section to the site. However, X user Corinne Green discovered that the section’s metadata – information not normally visible to someone browsing the site – indicated it was copied from Biden’s now-defunct campaign site.
Inside the section’s code, a line reading “Are you with us? Join our campaign to re-elect Joe Biden today!” could be seen. This line was visible when links to the issues section were shared or viewed in Google’s search results, The New Republic, a leftist news site, noted.
The error has since been corrected, and links to the issues section now read “Vice President Harris and Governor Walz are fighting for a New Way Forward.”
“This is dangerous territory for Harris,” The New Republic wrote, pointing out that according to a recent New York Times poll, more than 60% of voters want a “major change” from Biden’s policies, and only a quarter feel that Harris can deliver that change.
Inside the issues section, some of Harris’ own economic proposals are listed, including $25,000 grants for first-time home buyers and a ban on corporate “price gouging.” Most of the policies, however, are mirror images of those proposed by Biden, with Harris’ name and biographical details swapped in place of the president’s.
Harris and Trump will face each other in an ABC News debate on Tuesday night. Most recent polls show the two candidates within a single point of each other, and in a statistical dead heat in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
